Global Spina glimpse into the tiny mind of Chris Radcliff2014-09-05T00:31:56Zhttp://globalspin.com/feed/atom/WordPressChrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=19272014-09-05T00:31:56Z2014-09-05T00:30:58ZRecently it’s become plain that Twitter plans to add Facebook-style filtering to the Twitter timeline. In other words, Twitter would reserve the right to add or remove tweets from your timeline, rather than sending through every tweet from every account you follow (and none from those you don’t).

Twitter’s stated goal is to make your timeline more engaging, which makes sense based on how they’re monetizing the service. Twitter charges advertisers to promote content, which like any other advertising requires a big block of people constantly paying attention to be worth anything.

For some users, filtering like this means nothing less than the end of Twitter. That may seem overblown, but I think it’s a fair assessment. To be specific: filtering the timeline changes Twitter from a communications service into a news or entertainment service, which is inherently less valuable to me as a Twitter user.

I’ll step back and define some categories:

Communications services involve connecting to a network, then sending or receiving over that network with any other member, as a peer. Examples include mail, phone, ham radio, text messaging, email, IM, and Skype. Connecting to the network may involve cost (like phone service) or registration (like ham radio), but once connected you can send and receive to and from anyone. Communications services are often judged by the completeness and availability of the network (vs. dropped calls or missed emails).

News services involve curated content made by producers and received by consumers. They might use their own network (like newspapers or television) or piggyback on communications networks (like email newsletters or sports updates by text), but the content itself is their primary concern. News services are often judged by the accuracy and timeliness of their information. Choosing whether to cover a particular story is considered an editorial decision, but news services can get in trouble for presenting edited content as truth. (Thus “recorded earlier” notices, or “this interview has been condensed”.)

Entertainment services are like news services, but go a step further; they curate content to be engaging, without the requirement to be true or accurate. Entertainment services often go hand-in-hand with news services, delivered by the same network (like television) or even sharing the same packaging (like newspapers).

The lines between these are fuzzy, but one yardstick to use is the kind of complaints you’d find reasonable in each case. We complain to the phone company when we can’t make a call, but we don’t complain to them about getting 20 tech support calls from family each day. We complain to ESPN when they don’t cover enough soccer, but not that a broadcast game didn’t feature enough goals. Conversely, if the phone company blocked your aunt’s tech-support calls or ESPN added CG goals to the game, that would be unacceptable. You wouldn’t see it as “more engaging content”; it would make the service inherently less valuable to you.

At its core, Twitter is (and has always been) a communications network. It’s a broadcast network, like ham radio, but if I’m sending and you’re listening you expect to get my message. It’s a free service, like IM, but you’d rebel if you started receiving IMs from advertisers or found companies on your buddy lists without adding them. It delivers news and entertainment content, like the mail, but you’d be shocked if the post office rearranged your newspaper or tucked another DVD in the Netflix sleeve.

The justification Twitter gives for adding tweets to your timeline – hey, these are still real tweets, not ads! – misjudge the category they’re in. If CNN swaps news stories with other news, that’s an editorial decision we expect them to make. If AT&T connects my call to a random neighbor because my wife didn’t pick up, that’s bizarre and unexpected.

Considering it this way, I’m not surprised at all that Twitter users are threatening to leave if filtering is added. I’ll probably leave myself, and look for a social communications service that knows what kind of network it is.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=19012014-05-24T23:27:07Z2014-05-24T23:27:07ZCrowdfunding is big, and Patreon makes it useful to frequent makers of free art. The model works so well that I think it might revolutionize the way free software is made and paid for.

Paying for software sucks

Ever try applying a mod to Minecraft? They’re free to download, and they can add immensely to the gameplay. The trouble is that to pay for them, the developers put the files behind the nastiest advertising-based paywalls I’ve ever seen.

Finding ways to fund free software is broken. Part of it is the broad and fuzzy meaning of “free” here; it might be crucial open-source software like Linux produced by thousands of developers, or a freeware game made in an afternoon. It might be “free” and supported by ads (like those mods), or “free” and funded by a deep-pocketed patron who benefits from it (like Google Chrome).

Paid software isn’t much better. Despite the revolution brought by app stores (Steam and iOS in particular), the pay-up-front model still encourages developers to concentrate on a flashy big release with lots of features. Bug fixes and UX improvements are appreciated by users, but those users aren’t paying anything extra to get them.

In general, though, there’s a developer who has to choose between building your app and working on something else. Whether you’re waiting for a bug fix that keeps Kafka from paging you at 3am, or an update that adds reentry heating to Kerbal Space Program, you might find yourself wanting to shovel a little extra money in that developer’s direction to help them choose.

From the developer’s side, the ideal business model would be to give away the software to as many people as possible, then pick out the ones who can’t live without it and charge them as much as they’re willing to pay, monthly if they’ll put up with it.

Enter Patreon

Patreon was created in 2013 by Jack Conte, a musician who wanted to get his videos in front of as many people as possible. Jack didn’t like the two choices available to pay for them: YouTube advertising and iTunes. He was tempted to try crowdfunding, but couldn’t imagine running a new Kickstarter campaign for every new video just to cover a few hundred dollars.

Patreon works a lot like Kickstarter, but it’s progressive and recurring: Someone who loves Jack’s videos and wants him to make more can go to his Patreon page and pledge $1 toward the next video, which carries over to each video after that. Jack can then see how much patrons have pledged for the next video, whether $3 or $3000, and budget accordingly. When the video is done, Jack distributes it for free (to everyone, not just backers) and finds new people who love the video enough to kick in another dollar.

Patreon is new, but it’s already working well for both big and small projects. It provides recurring income to the artist, and a direct connection to the patrons. The patrons are paying a small amount for each release ($1 isn’t uncommon), but they can easily see how their pledges add up to give the project a decent budget. In some cases, artists have already dropped advertising because it annoys patrons who are kicking in enough to offset the income.

The key to Patreon’s model is that it encourages frequent releases of art made with the patrons in mind. When Jack is deciding whether a new video is worth doing, he has two natural questions to ask: “Will my patrons think this is worth the $1 they pledged?” and ”Am I willing to give up that patron money if I don’t do this?” The result is a regular cadence of good art.

Patreon is ready for free software as-is

If you’ve worked with an open-source software project, this might sound familiar to you. There might be lots of people waiting on new releases that fix bugs or add crucial features, but there are only so many spare hours in the day to work on them. A steady stream of patron dollars might encourage developers to work on their free software projects rather than take a contract job or start a new app for the App Store.

Patreon is neutral about the kinds of projects it accepts, so a developer could theoretically set up a Patreon page and start accepting backers right now. Each time an update is released, instead of linking to Youtube the developer would link to the update on GitHub or RubyGems or wherever they normally would.

Links back to Patreon could be added to the project’s README or changelog, or better yet mentioned on feature requests and when closing bugs. After a while, I imagine the relationship between backers and good releases would become plain in both directions: If you want better software, pledge more. If you want us to give more, make real improvements more often.

Frequent updates make better software

As a side benefit, the Patreon model would support the agile software development model. Each iteration (a short development cycle, usually with a fixed time) is judged on whether a notable improvement was shipped to customers, and patrons would be more likely to pledge based on the same metric. Bug fixes can be as valuable to existing users as new features, so there would be a strong business case for fixing bugs and making UX improvements each sprint that otherwise wouldn’t get on the roadmap.

Semantic versioning might see a surge in use, too. Rather than bundling flashy new features into big releases that justify re-purchasing software, the Patreon model would reward regular, repeated progress. Without a monetary reason to treat a point release as a major version (cough Twitterbot 3 cough), the field might be clear to set version numbers based on API compatibility.

Build funding into project sites

The obvious next step would be to create a patron-funding site specifically for software projects. GitHub is already a great community for describing, delivering, and collaborating on open-source software. Integrating patron funding would probably be straightforward. The same could be said of RubyGems or any other site that keeps track of version releases, too.

The tricky part, though, is getting the balance right; Patreon and Kickstarter have both done a great job (and put in some serious UX and community work) distinguishing “backers” and “pledges” from “donors” and “tips”, which seems to make all the difference. Software-patronage sites would have to work to connect the money pledged to real and regularly-delivered improvements to the software.

Still, I hope this model gets adopted by software projects sooner rather than later. I’d love to pay for updates to an amazing Minecraft mod by kicking in a dollar instead of dodging sketchy ads. Wouldn’t you?

When you look up at the sky tonight, count 25 stars. (It’s easy, because there are millions in view.) One of those 25 is a Sun-like star with an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, according to our best estimates.

There’s more going on than I can even list in an overview. A decade ago, most of this was science fiction. Welcome to 2014, when space is awesome.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18712013-06-28T07:43:59Z2013-06-28T07:43:59ZAs Kickstarter gets more popular, I’m seeing more lousy Kickstarters. Most of them get ruined because they break the fundamental rules implied by any Kickstarter project:

1. If you don’t meet the backing goal, this project will not happen.
2. If you do meet the backing goal, this project will happen.

In case they’re not obvious enough, an example:

The Furry Pink Car Example

Let’s say I built an absurdist art car, and I want to add furry pink seats in time for the next Burning Man. I have a good reason to want the new seats: riding in the car without them is uncomfortable enough that people complain loudly. However, I don’t have the funds to add them myself.

I have some rewards in mind: an exclusive video of the seats being installed, a ride in the car itself, and for top backers, your name painted on the passenger door.

I know there are plenty of people who would back my project, so I’m ready to go. How could I screw it up?

Remember: If the goal isn’t met, the project won’t happen.

Easy. I could state my project in broader terms than I’m actually funding. “Absurdist Art Car at Burning Man 2013!” My project video could talk all about the car, with a quick mention of how pink fluffy seats would be nice.

When potential backers read that title and watch that video, they’re left with a big question: “You already have this car. Why do you need more money?” From the project page (which is all they have to go on!) it sounds like the project will happen whether they back it or not.

I had this feeling about a recent space company that went the crowdfunding route. The rewards were the usual space-company merchandise, and the project boiled down to “Help us do what we’re already doing!” My contribution wasn’t going to make a difference, so I didn’t bother.

How could I fix it? Change my title to “Pink Fuzzy Seats: The Only Way To Travel” and describe the benefits (and unreasonable expense!) of the all-important seats. If the money doesn’t come through, the art car will be as uncomfortable as it was last year, so no rides for anyone!

Great! How could I screw that up, then?

Remember: If the goal is met, this project will happen.

Messing this up is more subtle, but a lot more common. There’s an assumption underlying my whole project, something I might completely miss by (correctly) stating the goal narrowly. Take a look: can you spot it?

That’s right: I need a working, drivable art car. The rewards require it, the seats are useless without it. If something happens to that car so that I can’t take it to Burning Man, then I’m on the hook to fix it.

WITHOUT asking for more money. That’s the really tough part. Going back to those fluffy-seat backers with a second Kickstarter (or IndieGoGo, or anything like it) seems natural, but it’s dead wrong. By asking for new funds to make an old project possible, I’m casting doubt on my ability to complete that project at all. Why would my backers throw good money after bad?

I often see this problem with films and other art projects, the kind that have lots of steps. (Writing, shooting, editing, post-production, distribution, aigh!) It’s natural to make the film the project, with backer rewards to match, but if you’re just funding the first steps you should only provide rewards from those steps. (A rough cut of the film, for example.) Don’t offer the whole film if you’re only funding part of it.

In my case, I’m resolving to keep the car running and get it to Burning Man, no matter what. It’s something I would have had to do anyway, but now my backers are relying on me to get the furry pink seats on the road.

Note that I’m not going to list “car breaking down” as one of the “risks” or “uncertainties” on the project page, either. If Burning Man is canceled, that’s an uncertainty. If faux pink fur melts in the Black Rock sun, that’s a risk. However, I’m pledging to do everything I can to get the car there, and it’s reasonable to expect me to deliver on that promise.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18612013-06-22T04:30:57Z2013-06-22T04:30:34ZSometimes I need to work out a rough calculation to check whether my idea of something science-fictiony has any basis in reality. It doesn’t need to be super-rigorous*, but close enough to tell if my conception is way off the mark.

In this case, I’ve been thinking about how it might feel to walk around a city on Mars. It’s likely to be mostly underground to help shield against radiation, but there should be as much daylight as possible to save energy. On Earth, that kind of daylighting comes from skylights, windows, and (my personal favorite) light tubes.

But what about on Mars? Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth is, so it gets less light on the surface, but how much less? Is walking down a Martian street destined to feel like a gloomy overcast day?

First I had to get a grip on how to measure daylight. An obvious comparison is solar radiation, measured in Watts per square meter. Depending on time of year, Mars gets between 1/3 and 1/2 as much solar radiation as Earth, because it’s about 50% farther from the Sun. That’s handy for figuring solar power output, but the human eye isn’t so linear.

Another way is illuminance, measured in lux. Though the exact conversion factor between solar radiation and lux is a bit tricky due to the eye’s reaction to different wavelengths, I gather that the relationship is linear. Thus, using some standard Earth values and scaling them:

on Earth

on Mars (min)

on Mars (max)

direct sunlight

110,000 lux

38,000 lux

55,000 lux

indirect daylight

20,000 lux

6,800? lux

10,000? lux

clear sunrise/sunset

400 lux

130 lux

200 lux

(I’m assuming that indirect daylight is scattered as well in Mars’s pink sky as it is in Earth’s blue. Something to check later.)

Filling in a few other Earthly values for comparison:

bright overcast

25,000 lux

dark overcast

10,000 lux

studio lighting

1000 lux

office lighting

500 lux

cloudy sunrise/sunset

40 lux

So it looks like daylight on Mars wouldn’t look too different from daylight on Earth. It’s orders of magnitude more light than during “golden hour” on Earth, which is plenty to get around by. It would probably feel like a partly-cloudy day, since there would be more light than even the brightest overcast day, with sharply-defined shadows.

For daylighting, this probably means that Martian interiors would need twice as many Solatubes to get the same level of illumination, but we’re still talking about a fraction of the available daylight. In other words, using Earth-style lighting techniques should keep a Martian city street from feeling gloomy.

*Note the use of Wikipedia sources. Kids, don’t use Wikipedia as a source if you want anyone to take you seriously.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18392013-06-18T20:08:16Z2013-06-18T20:08:16ZIt may surprise you to discover I still work with Facebook on a daily basis. I did leave Facebook as a user over three years ago, but wrangling the Graph API is still a core part of my job. (For the web developers among you: It’s like your relationship with Internet Explorer.)

Last week I was updating Measured Voice to match changes in the Facebook permissions dialog, and I noticed that the documentation said one of my permissions was now out of date:

“Facebook used to have a permission called publish_stream, publish_actions replaces it.”

In a fit of eagerness, I broke the first rule of API usage* and switched out publish_stream for publish_actions. However, it soon became obvious that the two weren’t equal. The auth tokens produced before and after my update were markedly different:

with publish_stream

Requested

Granted

manage_pages

→

manage_pages

read_insights

→

read_insights

user_about_me

→

user_about_me

user_status

→

user_status

publish_stream

→

publish_stream

→

publish_actions

→

video_upload

→

create_note

→

photo_upload

→

share_item

→

status_update

with publish_actions

Requested

Granted

manage_pages

→

manage_pages

read_insights

→

read_insights

user_about_me

→

user_about_me

user_status

→

user_status

publish_actions

→

publish_actions

Requesting publish_stream gave me publish_actions anyway, which makes sense if the two are being treated as equals, but it also gave me a whole passel of other permissions I hadn’t asked for. As it turns out, at least one of those permissions is still necessary to do what I need: post status updates and photos to a Facebook Page.

But which one? I checked the documentation again, and… well, none of them are documented at all. Not listed anywhere, not mentioned as deprecated, not anything. Huh. Some of them do sound like permissions I’d need (photo_upload and status_update, for example), but without documentation it’s just a guess.

It sounds like the documentation is ahead of the actual API development, and reflects some design goal instead. Or maybe this is (yet another) API bug. Either way, I’m going back to requesting publish_stream until they get their facts straight. It still works. (For now.)

* “If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade to the new revision.”

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18212012-08-10T19:39:14Z2012-08-10T19:32:40ZI won’t start an argument about the definition of “hard SF” or the state of scientific accuracy in fiction, but here are a few handy rules for science-fiction writers who want a quick test of real-science groundedness.

I call them Joi’s Laws, because SF writer Joi Weaver put them so well. (The headlines are her laws; the rambling context is mine.) Each one is a challenge: avoid this common crutch when starting your own story. Think of them like the Bechdel Test for solid science.

No FTL Travel

Space is big, and ships are slow. That’s the reality for at least another century, so embrace it. Faster-than-light travel lets your characters hop from star system to star system, but what are you really gaining? How is a rock around Epsilon Eridani inherently more interesting than a rock in the Main Belt?

Even if your story is set in the far future around a far star, FTL travel is dispensable. Joss Whedon didn’t need it for Firefly, and his (solar-system-sized) universe was packed full of interesting locations.

No Aliens

Everyone knows it: aliens in most stories are just humans with funny foreheads. Even the most unusual aliens in the most mind-bending stories turn out to have mostly human attributes, because a) it’s hard to imagine anything truly alien, and b) it’s harder to relate to truly alien aliens. So stop trying. Humans and animals have bizarre enough variations to fill a century of stories.

My own corollary: No Monsters. Monster stories are great and all, but 99% of new sci-fi is already cluttered with zombies, mutant viruses, and killer robots. Next time you need something terrifying, how about the interplanetary DMV instead?

No Artificial Gravity

This one is tough even for me. I’m obsessed with gravity, and I honestly believe we’ll be a second-rate spacefaring species until we learn to control it. Still, no one is close to controlling gravity even a little bit, so spaceships with a solid one-gee field working at all times are still pure fantasy.

Besides, fifty years of astronaut hijinks teach us that weightlessness is one of the best things about space travel, and we haven’t yet explored the spectacle of low-gravity sports. The only reason your characters would actually choose to be in a one-gee field (occasionally) is due to health concerns, and a treatment for bone loss is much more believable than gravity control.

“It’s more a guideline than a code.”

Good stories can still be told if they violate Joi’s Laws. (I’m going to see the next Star Trek film just like everyone else.) They’re not a guarantee of a good story, either. If you want to tell a *new* story, though, keep these in mind to give yourself a bit of a real-science challenge.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18072012-04-13T19:45:33Z2012-04-13T21:45:37ZOn March 11th, 2012 in Austin, TX at the SXSW Interactive conference, I had the privilege of being on a panel of space enthusiasts called “How to Win Friends and Influence Space Exploration“. You can listen to audio of the panel at the SXSW site.

The panel was fun, and I put together a slide show to serve as spacy background for it. Those slides are big and unwieldy because they have huge images and video, but you’re welcome to have them if you’d like:

I might try to put the audio and slides together somewhere so you get the full effect, but that’s going to be a pain. If someone with better skills than me would like to do that, you have my blessing. Please send me the result if/when you post it so I can link it in here.

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=18012012-04-11T04:13:00Z2012-04-11T04:13:00ZTonight I read the geeklet a story at bedtime, the kind of thing that’s designed to be restful with a hint of mind-broadening moral reassurance. As I finished, he looked thoughtful.

“We wouldn’t be here without this.” He tapped on the floor. “I don’t mean the floor, or the neighbors downstairs. I mean the ground underneath us.”

“That’s right.”

“We also wouldn’t be here without this.” He held up is palm, and this time I wasn’t sure what he meant. “We wouldn’t be here without the sky.”

“That’s also true.” I stood up and turned out the light. “Good night.”

He wasn’t done, though. “The sky wiped out the dinosaurs so we could take over.”

“Mm hmm,” I said, without even a pause. “Good night.”

“Good night, daddy.”

]]>0Chrishttp://globalspin.comhttp://globalspin.com/?p=17872012-03-29T22:37:36Z2012-03-29T17:29:45ZSometimes I get the urge to write a short story. Usually the feeling passes, but this one stuck with me and kept nagging until I let it out. More story notes at the bottom.

A shaggy dog barred my path through the door. He was my sister’s dog, a long-suffering poodle lounging in the Louisiana heat. “I can’t believe you make him put up with this humidity,” I said as I stepped over him and into the tiny office.

My sister grunted but didn’t look up from her pile of papers. “He doesn’t mind. You’re projecting.” It was true; I didn’t like the heat any more than George seemed to. Boulder was much more my style, but Lalita preferred to live in places that felt like saunas to me. Mumbai, Austin, and now Baton Rouge.

It was like she picked the stickiest, dingiest places just to keep me away. I know, projecting again. At least I visited her wherever her research funding happened to take her; she hadn’t been to see me in Boulder once in the decade I’d lived there.

“You could at least put a fan in here or something.” I looked around at the office, packed full of textbooks, reference books, papers, ebook readers, tablets, and more than one empty soda can. “Or do something about the flies. It’s—”

“—a pit, I know,” she said and swiveled around on her chair, finally looking me in the eye. “It’s a steaming mess of shocking proportions, and my clothes aren’t any better, and I’m wasting my life without a good solid job.” She tossed her hair back defiantly and stared directly at me. “Should I conference Mother in too, or have we covered it all ourselves?”

I held out my hands, warding off the tongue-lashing. “OK, OK. Truce.”

My sister relaxed and looked at the floor again. “You’ve only been here a day. Our half-life is usually at least three.”

“Half-life?”

She got a mischievous look in her eye, the way she used to look when we shared a secret as girls. “It usually takes three days before half our conversations are about each other’s failings.” She grabbed an end of chalk and drew a swooping line graph on the board nearest us, starting high and dropping off quickly. The scrawled legend read “substance”, and a dot marked a point half-way down. “We’re only a day in, though, so…” she trailed off while figuring out the current value. “…we should still be saying meaningful things about 85% of the time.”

I barely suppressed a smile. “Then let’s. Are you ready for lunch?” I didn’t mention how anxious I was to get away from the buzz of insects and into the air-conditioned restaurant.

“Ready,” she said, and grabbed a tablet from the desk. We stepped over the still-sleeping George, and Lalita reached down to give him a quick pat. “Watch over my work. Good dog.”

—

The restaurant was a blessed relief for me, but Lalita looked uncomfortable as soon as we sat down. “We could have eaten on campus,” she said and scowled at the menu.

“Don’t worry. I’ll cover it.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. She frowned at me and closed the menu. “What? You know why I’m here. There’s no use pretending this is a sisterly visit.”

“OK, then. Let’s be plain,” she said. She picked up the tablet and turned it so I could see. “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday, and there’s something I want to show you.”

“About the teleportation project?” Again, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. I’d been saying the wrong things to her for decades, so why should it stop now? “What?”

“Stop calling it that,” she said. “When you call it teleportation people start thinking of transporters and time machines, and that’s what I’m trying to warn you about.”

I couldn’t help it. “Time machines?” I practically barked it, then realized where we were. I leaned in closer and whispered conspiratorially. “Who calls it a time machine?”

“NOT time machines!” she yelled. I reeled back and almost knocked over my water.

“All right, not time machines. Forget I said it. Show me what you were going to show me.” I leaned in again and focused on the tablet.

The graphic on the tablet was a sophisticated version of the ones I’d seen on Lalita’s chalkboards many times before. Lines split, joined, and crossed each other in intricate patterns. It looked like something out of a how-to book of sailor’s knots than anything I knew of physics, but I knew better than to make the analogy.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a simulation of the kind of particle interactions we’ve been working with in the lab.” She started poking at the visualization, and dots raced from one side to the other, following the intertwined paths. Now it looked more like a hospital chart, except those usually didn’t backtrack and spin around each other.

“Back up,” I said. “What am I looking at here?”

“This is the simplified world lines of the particles as they interact. This axis is time–”

“No it isn’t. If it was, those particles shouldn’t be going the wrong way.” I pointed to places where some of the bright dots turned around and moved backwards relative to others.

She looked flustered. “Not if you give each particle it’s own arrow of time. You know that from relativity; there’s no preferred direction for them to point.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “Yes, I know what a space-time vector is. I also know that no matter which vector you choose, none of the others will point the other way entirely.”

“They do if you follow the quantum signatures in a continuous path instead of treating them as annihilations. That’s what we’ve been doing in the lab; verifying that certain antiparticles really are their counterparts traveling backwards in time.”

This was news to me, but not what I came here for. “If this is what you mean by not a time machine, please do tell me about your not-a-teleporter.”

She groaned and threw the tablet down on the table with a clatter. “You don’t listen!”

Luckily, our food was served at that moment. We sat in stony silence, and I noticed a speck of something move around in my water glass. A fly, apparently doing its impression of a crazed particle’s world-line. I asked for another glass of water.

“Look,” she said, “I know you can understand this. You’re an engineer, for God’s sake. Just listen.” She picked up the tablet again and started the dots on their travels. “By tracing the signatures, we showed that quantum teleportation–” –a warning look– “–listen! Quantum teleportation does truly impose the state of a particle, its identity you could call it, on a distant particle. More importantly, though, we showed *how*. Look at the green one here, and watch it teleport.”

She held her finger over one of the racing dots, and suddenly I saw what she meant. It traveled up and down along its path, but then turned around in a shower of sparks to zip back along a trail that I had assumed was another particle. That flew off—in the wrong direction, the negative-time direction—until it joined another group of swirling particles and made its way forward again. Finally it got back to its “original” time and met up with the sparks it had given up.

“It didn’t teleport at all, did it?” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. “It traveled back in time to make its way to where the duplicate was.”

Lalita beamed. “She can be taught! That’s exactly right. The laser doesn’t create a duplicate of the particle, it forces it to zigzag in time until it ends up in the right place.”

My head was swimming, and it was hard to make the leaps she expected of me. “OK, I get this part. Isn’t the end result the same?”

She scowled again. “Do you still get to send your spy-beams, you mean?”

“They aren’t spy beams.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Oh really? You want to point a beam and send a camera to spy on someone.” She mimed the process with her hands, and I had to laugh.

“OK, OK. If they’re spy beams, why can’t it be a teleporter?”

Lalita looked serious again. “In a word: histories.”

“Histories.”

“Yes, histories.”

I waited for her to go on, but she must have been waiting for me to catch up. I stared at my water glass and noticed another fly had fallen in it, before I’d even taken a sip. I knew how it felt.

I finally gave up. “Which means?”

She leaned forward with the mischevious look again. “See? Physics is good for something. Each particle doesn’t have just one path it takes through space-time. Quantum physics shows us it takes all the paths it can, and the combined histories of all those paths are what we perceive.”

She paused again, but I still wasn’t getting it. “And?”

“And all those histories are important. They interact in ways that are more complex than a single world-line would. If you cause the particle’s path to be too restricted, too deterministic, a lot of the physics we rely on stops working.”

“Such as?”

“If we try to pin down the exact moment an atom changes state, it stops having the chance to do so. Its histories get so pinched that it can’t do its job.”

It finally dawned on me. “The teleported particle. It’s pinched?”

“Exactly.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing much, if you’re working with one particle. The more complex you get, the more histories you’re pinching and the harder it is to hold everything together.”

I sagged in my seat. “So it’s impossible?”

“Well,” she said. “Nothing’s impossible. But we’re not going to be beaming any spies for you anytime soon.”

—

That night we managed to get through dinner without talking about spy beams or time machines. Lalita was much more comfortable in her own kitchen than the hotel restaurant, though I probably cooked there more than she did. She asked me about my work, and I told her as much as I could, minus the classified details. We talked about the lack of funding for pure physics research, and I gently offered for the thousandth time to get her an applied research position at my company. She gently ignored the offer for the thousandth time.

It was over the second bottle of wine that she dropped the bomb. I’ll always remember the scene exactly: the two of us sitting around her tiny kitchen table, her leaning down to feed George the remains of our meal with one hand while cradling a wine glass with the other. Me stacking dishes off to one side because I was avoiding any work in the humid evening. A moth hovering near the lamp above the table, bouncing annoyingly between the lampshade and the bulb cover without settling down.

“I worry about time travel.” She said it matter-of-factly, like she was talking about our mother’s new boyfriend or the rent.

“Do you, now?” I wasn’t sure how seriously to take her.

“I do. The results we’re getting in the lab are very troubling. I wish we had enough theory to know whether they’re as bad as I think or if they’re self-correcting.”

“Troubling? In what way?” I’m not sure why, but I’ve always felt a special dread when my sister’s work troubles her. The problems physicists worry about tend to be either trivial or world-ending, and it’s hard to tell which are which.

“Remember those pinched histories? They can be… bad.” Her voice trailed off.

“Bad? How bad?”

“Just as bad as I showed you. When we tried to affect quantum state over distances, it reached back into the past to make that possible and pinched all the histories involved. I wanted to see if we could use that effect to change quantum states in the past.” She frowned.

“And? Could you?”

“Yes, but…” She took a minute to scratch George behind the ears. “The pinching effect was a lot worse. The remaining histories deviated so far from the norm that we had trouble recording what actually happened. It was like every roll of the quantum dice came up sixes. Some of the most fundamental processes in the universe just… stopped.”

She drained her glass of wine and poured another. I noticed her hands shake a little.

“Is this why you don’t like time machines?” It was the wrong thing to say again, but this time she just deflated. For the first time, I felt bad about riling my sister. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”

She gulped another glass and grabbed a tablet. “Do you ever wonder about aliens?” She poked violently at the tablet’s screen.

“What? Aliens?”

“Aliens. Specifically, where are they?” She showed me the tablet’s screen, now covered with a map of the sky, filled with stars and their myriad names. “A third of these stars have planets like Earth. Some of them have life like ours, and some of that life might evolve into beings capable of space travel or interstellar communication.” She paused, staring at the map.

“And?”

“And so where are they? According to the best odds we know, there should be civilizations spanning the entire galaxy, including here. Where is everyone?”

I still didn’t see where this was going. “If the theory doesn’t fit the data, don’t blame the data.”

“Oh, I don’t.” She had fire in her eyes now. “The best guess is that civilizations all reach some world-ending event before they get off their own planet.”

“Right, like nuclear weapons.”

“Yes, but we dodged that bullet. Someone else must have as well, but they’re still missing in action. So what’s coming for us? What’s going to snuff us out before we get anywhere?”

“Who says anything will?”

She looked at me as though I was being willfully ignorant. “What about time travel?”

My head was spinning, and it wasn’t the wine. I was starting to think that my sister was putting me on. “Time travel? You think we’ll be killed off by pinched histories?”

“It could happen.”

“Really?”

“Well…” She looked doubtful for a second. “I’m not sure. The strange thing about time is that no matter how you change it, it always turns out to have been that way.”

I groaned. “You’ve stopped making sense. I should go.” I stood up, a little uncertainly.

“No, wait. What I mean is that if pinched histories were going to end us, they would have already done so in the past. Our past. We wouldn’t be here–”

“–having this completely ludicrous conversation.” I said. “Good night.” I patted George and left before the conversation could get worse.

—

The next day I awoke with a start, sitting bolt upright in the hotel bed, a little disoriented about where I was. Something in my dream had been very important, but it drifted away before I could remember.

Over breakfast in the hotel restaurant, it came back to me all at once. I watched a fly wind its way around the lazily-spinning ceiling fan, and it all became clear. I dashed out of the hotel and nearly ran to the university before realizing that it was miles away and I’d die from heat exhaustion after a few blocks.

The taxi couldn’t get me there fast enough. The whole way I worried that my epiphany was a hangover-induced delusion, something my sister would tear to shreds with a single comment. Still, I had to tell her. It might be right.

George was draped across the doorway to her office again, and Lalita looked at me sleepily over her breakfast pastry. “Mff?” she said, and her eyes opened wide as I leaped over the shaggy dog.

I was out of breath, but I had to tell her. “You don’t have to worry. The pinched histories won’t get us, and time travel will turn out just fine.” I stood up straighter as I regained my breath. “Those other civilizations didn’t survive discovering time travel, but that doesn’t mean no one will. We will. We did.”

She swallowed her bite of pastry and a swig of tea. “How can you know that?”

“Look, you said it yourself. History is the way it will be, and anything we do to change it will already have been done. You’ll figure out the upper limit to what we can teleport safely to the past, and we’ll find a good use for it.” I was practically dancing. “In fact, I want you to come work with me on a new kind of spy beam anyone will appreciate. We’ll rewrite history in a good way, by learning all its secrets.”

Lalita just stood there, open mouthed. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

I pointed up at the ceiling, and Lalita’s eyes opened wider as she looked at the hundreds and hundreds of insects milling around up there. I beamed at her and declared triumphantly, “Time flies!”

—

Author’s Note

Yeah, sorry about that. The puns are bad and physics is awful, but at least the story and characterization are terrible.

This story came out of three ideas that nagged me incessantly:

The “time flies” concept came first. Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall at the signing of the Declaration of Independence? We always say that, but who’s actually doing something about it? Surely we could come up with a way to send a tiny fly-cam back in time and bring it back, all without interrupting the “original” history. Who notices another fly?

The idea that time travel destroys advanced civilizations was inspired by a discussion on Twitter about Fermi’s Paradox, mixed with recent research on the nature of cause and effect in increasingly-weird quantum interactions. [citation needed]

Oh yes, the puns. Some of my favorite Asimov short stories are either shaggy-dog stories (like Shah Guido G.) or discussions between two people about some kind of world-changing idea (like Darwinian Pool Room). Poor George is a nod to the former, and the two sisters provide the latter while also satisfying the Bechdel Test.